“Damage and destroy new CO2 emitting devices. Put them out of commission, pick them apart, demolish them, burn them, blow them up…. Sabotage, after all, is not incompatible with social distancing.” (Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, 2021: 3, 67)
“How will Malm keep people from freezing to death in the winter or dying from heat exhaustion in summer after his followers have disabled power plants or the pipelines that supply them?” (below)
There are “no regrets” policy changes that can reduce CO2 emissions by expanding, not reducing, freedom. Repealing the Merchant Marine Act of 1920 (aka, the Jones Act), for example, would eliminate the Act’s enormous carbon footprint. The Act, which requires goods shipped between American ports to be transported on American owned, built, and crewed ships, makes it impossible for Americans to make full use of the veritable conveyor belt of ships that navigate our nations’ waters. …
Continue Reading“Following prior attempts to preclude private investor participation in the energy sector through Congressional legislation … President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, submitted to the Mexican Congress a Bill to … undo the Constitutional changes that opened the market for private investment and intend to limit/preclude private sector participation.” (Foley & Lardner, below)
“There is a general economic maxim: public (government) resources are really private, owned and exploited by a political elite, while private resources are really public, owned and managed by a multitude. Government-owned resources do not ‘belong to all of the people’ and allow ‘self determination;’ they belong to none or a very few.” (RLB, below)
The independence of Texas from Mexico after the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836 inaugurated the era of private property rights to the subsoil.…
Continue Reading“Using moralistic yet blatantly dishonest slogans and pseudo-science, the environmental movement has digressed dangerously…. One of the most fundamental truths rarely surfaces among the movement: there is no credible alternative to hydrocarbons in both the near and far foreseeable futures.” (Michael Economides, below)
He was irascible in person but a rare energy realist in thought and action. Michael Economides (1949–2013) was many things, including leading oil consultant and Lecturer in Petroleum Engineering at the Cullen College of Engineering at the University of Houston. [1]
With Ronald Oligney, he authored an important book, The Color of Oil: The History, the Money and the Politics of the World’s Biggest Business (2000). Some quotations follow:
… Continue Reading“… energy is the world’s biggest business, and it continues to move unstoppably forward.” (p. 17)
“We predict that the world will not run out of oil for the next three centuries, at least.”